Chapter 10

Chapter 10 Completing My Education

WHOSOEVER has done me the courtesy to read my chapters which have precededthis may possibly wonder that I deal so minutely with piloting as a science.It was the prime purpose of those chapters; and I am not quite done yet.I wish to show, in the most patient and painstaking way, what a wonderfulscience it is. Ship channels are buoyed and lighted, and therefore it isa comparatively easy undertaking to learn to run them; clear-water rivers,with gravel bottoms, change their channels very gradually, and thereforeone needs to learn them but once; but piloting becomes another matterwhen you apply it to vast streams like the Mississippi and the Missouri,whose alluvial banks cave and change constantly, whose snags are alwayshunting up new quarters, whose sand-bars are never at rest, whose channelsare for ever dodging and shirking, and whose obstructions must beconfronted in all nights and all weathers without the aid of a singlelight-house or a single buoy; for there is neither light nor buoy to befound anywhere in all this three or four thousand miles of villainousriver. Ifeel justified in enlarging upon this great science for the reason that Ifeel sure no one has ever yet written a paragraph about it who had piloteda steamboat himself, and so had a practical knowledge of the subject.If the theme were hackneyed, I should be obliged to deal gently withthe reader; but since it is wholly new, I have felt at liberty to take upa considerable degree of room with it.

When I had learned the name and position of every visiblefeature of the river; when I had so mastered its shape that Icould shut my eyes and trace it from St. Louis to New Orleans;when I had learned to read the face of the water as one wouldcull the news from the morning paper; and finally, when Ihad trained my dull memory to treasure up an endless arrayof soundings and crossing-marks, and keep fast hold of them,I judged that my education was complete: so I got to tiltingmy cap to the side of my head, and wearing a tooth-pick in mymouth at the wheel. Mr. Bixby had his eye on these airs.One day he said--

'What is the height of that bank yonder, at Burgess's?'

'How can I tell, sir. It is three-quarters of a mile away.'

'Very poor eye--very poor. Take the glass.'

I took the glass, and presently said--'I can't tell.I suppose that that bank is about a foot and a half high.'

'Foot and a half! That's a six-foot bank. How high was the bankalong here last trip?'

'I don't know; I never noticed.'

'You didn't? Well, you must always do it hereafter.'

'Why?'

'Because you'll have to know a good many things that it tells you.For one thing, it tells you the stage of the river--tells you whetherthere's more water or less in the river along here than therewas last trip.'

'The leads tell me that.' I rather thought I had the advantageof him there.

'Yes, but suppose the leads lie? The bank would tell you so,and then you'd stir those leadsmen up a bit. There was a ten-footbank here last trip, and there is only a six-foot bank now.What does that signify?'

'That the river is four feet higher than it was last trip.'

'Very good. Is the river rising or falling?'

'Rising.'

'No it ain't.'

'I guess I am right, sir. Yonder is some drift-wood floatingdown the stream.'

'A rise starts the drift-wood, but then it keeps on floating a while afterthe river is done rising. Now the bank will tell you about this. Wait tillyou come to a place where it shelves a little. Now here; do you see thisnarrow belt of fine sediment That was deposited while the water was higher.You see the driftwood begins to strand, too. The bank helps in other ways.Do you see that stump on the false point?'

'Ay, ay, sir.'

'Well, the water is just up to the roots of it.You must make a note of that.'

'Why?'

'Because that means that there's seven feet in the chute of 103.'

'But 103 is a long way up the river yet.'

'That's where the benefit of the bank comes in. There is waterenough in 103 NOW, yet there may not be by the time we get there;but the bank will keep us posted all along. You don't run closechutes on a falling river, up-stream, and there are precious fewof them that you are allowed to run at all down-stream. There'sa law of the United States against it. The river may be risingby the time we get to 103, and in that case we'll run it.We are drawing--how much?'

'Six feet aft,--six and a half forward.'

'Well, you do seem to know something.'

'But what I particularly want to know is, if I have got to keep up aneverlasting measuring of the banks of this river, twelve hundred miles,month in and month out?'

'Of course!'

My emotions were too deep for words for a while.Presently I said--'

And how about these chutes. Are there many of them?'

'I should say so. I fancy we shan't run any of the river this tripas you've ever seen it run before--so to speak. If the river beginsto rise again, we'll go up behind bars that you've always seenstanding out of the river, high and dry like the roof of a house;we'll cut across low places that you've never noticed at all,right through the middle of bars that cover three hundred acres of river;we'll creep through cracks where you've always thought was solid land;we'll dart through the woods and leave twenty-five miles of riveroff to one side; we'll see the hind-side of every island between NewOrleans and Cairo.'

'Then I've got to go to work and learn just as much more riveras I already know.'

'Just about twice as much more, as near as you can come at it.'

'Well, one lives to find out. I think I was a fool when I wentinto this business.'

'Yes, that is true. And you are yet. But you'll not bewhen you've learned it.'

'Ah, I never can learn it.'

'I will see that you DO.'

By and by I ventured again--

'Have I got to learn all this thing just as I know the rest of the river--shapes and all--and so I can run it at night?'

'Yes. And you've got to have good fair marks from one endof the river to the other, that will help the bank tell youwhen there is water enough in each of these countless places--like that stump, you know. When the river first beginsto rise, you can run half a dozen of the deepest of them;when it rises a foot more you can run another dozen;the next foot will add a couple of dozen, and so on:so you see you have to know your banks and marks to a deadmoral certainty, and never get them mixed; for when you startthrough one of those cracks, there's no backing out again,as there is in the big river; you've got to go through,or stay there six months if you get caught on a falling river.There are about fifty of these cracks which you can't run at allexcept when the river is brim full and over the banks.'

'This new lesson is a cheerful prospect.'

'Cheerful enough. And mind what I've just told you; when youstart into one of those places you've got to go through.They are too narrow to turn around in, too crooked to back out of,and the shoal water is always up at the head; never elsewhere.And the head of them is always likely to be filling up, little by little,so that the marks you reckon their depth by, this season, may notanswer for next.'

'Learn a new set, then, every year?'

'Exactly. Cramp her up to the bar! What are you standing upthrough the middle of the river for?'

The next few months showed me strange things. On the same day that we heldthe conversation above narrated, we met a great rise coming down the river.The whole vast face of the stream was black with drifting dead logs,broken boughs, and great trees that had caved in and been washed away.It required the nicest steering to pick one's way through thisrushing raft, even in the day-time, when crossing from point to point;and at night the difficulty was mightily increased; every now and thena huge log, lying deep in the water, would suddenly appear rightunder our bows, coming head-on; no use to try to avoid it then;we could only stop the engines, and one wheel would walk over that logfrom one end to the other, keeping up a thundering racket and careeningthe boat in a way that was very uncomfortable to passengers.Now and then we would hit one of these sunken logs a rattling bang,dead in the center, with a full head of steam, and it would stun the boatas if she had hit a continent. Sometimes this log would lodge, and stayright across our nose, and back the Mississippi up before it; we wouldhave to do a little craw-fishing, then, to get away from the obstruction.We often hit WHITE logs, in the dark, for we could not see them till wewere right on them; but a black log is a pretty distinct object at night.A white snag is an ugly customer when the daylight is gone.

Of course, on the great rise, down came a swarm of prodigioustimber-rafts from the head waters of the Mississippi,coal barges from Pittsburgh, little trading scows from everywhere,and broad-horns from 'Posey County,' Indiana, freighted with 'fruitand furniture'--the usual term for describing it, though in plainEnglish the freight thus aggrandized was hoop-poles and pumpkins.Pilots bore a mortal hatred to these craft; and it was returnedwith usury. The law required all such helpless traders to keepa light burning, but it was a law that was often broken.All of a sudden, on a murky night, a light would hop up,right under our bows, almost, and an agonized voice,with the backwoods 'whang' to it, would wail out--

'Whar'n the ---- you goin' to! Cain't you see nothin', you dash-dashedaig-suckin', sheep-stealin', one-eyed son of a stuffed monkey!'

Then for an instant, as we whistled by, the red glare from our furnaceswould reveal the scow and the form of the gesticulating oratoras if under a lightning-flash, and in that instant our firemen anddeck-hands would send and receive a tempest of missiles and profanity,one of our wheels would walk off with the crashing fragmentsof a steering-oar, and down the dead blackness would shut again.And that flatboatman would be sure to go into New Orleans and sueour boat, swearing stoutly that he had a light burning all the time,when in truth his gang had the lantern down below to sing and lieand drink and gamble by, and no watch on deck. Once, at night, in oneof those forest-bordered crevices (behind an island) which steamboatmenintensely describe with the phrase 'as dark as the inside of a cow,'we should have eaten up a Posey County family, fruit, furniture, and all,but that they happened to be fiddling down below, and we just caughtthe sound of the music in time to sheer off, doing no serious damage,unfortunately, but coming so near it that we had good hopes for a moment.These people brought up their lantern, then, of course; and as we backedand filled to get away, the precious family stood in the light of it--both sexes and various ages--and cursed us till everything turned blue.Once a coalboatman sent a bullet through our pilot-house, when we borrowed asteering oar of him in a very narrow place.